Computer Science and Christmas

* What are your favorite/essential Christmas season foods/drinks/recipes? I am planning for the Christmas party (and Katy's brother, mom and mom's manfriend are coming over for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day). Also I am just curious.
* List of International Christmas Dishes by Country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christmas_dishes
* http://www.uncollege.org/archives/1441 : I'd take CS101, Machine Learning, and/or Human-Computer Interaction (I lack the probability, calculus and programing language capabilities for the others) if anyone wanted to do then with me so we could chat about it (I do better when not learning totally alone).

Shame: uniting theme

* The Ohio Animal Massacre: http://gawker.com/5851560/all-the-ohio-animals-are-dead . When my mom recounted this story to me, I cried.

Someone on Gawker said "I would not blame the sheriff's department. They had zero expertise in handling something like this, and the NYT article today mentioned that one of the tigers was shot with tranquilizers and kept going anyway. Better this than a child gets mauled.

The villain here is the asshole who 1) collected all of these animals for his own private menagerie, and 2) shot himself after freeing all the animals, surely knowing that the law enforcement response would be extreme. What a fucking piece of shit."

Re: inexperience: This is not the case, though--Zanesville is very close to the gigantic safari preserve, The Wilds ([thewilds.org]), which certainly had the resources and personnel to tranquilize these animals safely. Additionally given their proximity to this preserve, they could and should have had a contingency plan. As such this was not so much a case of responding poorly to an unprecedented situation as one of criminal negligence, and all responsible parties should be tried and stripped of their positions.

Additionally, said animal 'collector' (said throughout the comments in a sneering tone) had raised and protected some endangered, tame animals since babyhood, preserving and breeding them in a way that was valuable. You may perhaps believe that this is not as ideal as the animals being raised in natural or naturalistic circumstances, but be that as it may, this was a man who cared deeply about these animals, and they about him. He was not some dilettante--this was his livelihood, the animals appeared in films and the like. If people involved in animal welfare believed his conditions should have been improved upon, that is an entirely separate question, and should have been a matter of negotiation, a time-table for improvement, etc. It is little more than unsubstantiated irrelevant rumor, and is being used to cloud the moral issue at hand by disbursing blame onto the dead owner. And if you want to judge the rationality of the decisions made by a suicidally depressed man, and to claim someone in this state is capable of predicting a response that no one might have deemed the rational outcome of the situation, fine, whatever--but that is also not relevant to the matter.

The thought of the men who did this makes me sick and sad, and they will never have to account for it in any way.

* http://gawker.com/5861197/uc-davis-students-creepy-powerful-protest-against-pepper+spray-chancellor : Behold the incredibly effective public shaming of the university head who authorized the torture of her peacefully protesting students.